Mirkat Always Reading

A little over a month ago, I attended a conference (I work in continuing medical education).  One of my favorite sessions was on psychology and behavioral economics.  By serendipity, concepts from the session are showing up in books I read/listen to.  Peak-end rule and elements of decision theory showed up in When by Daniel Pink.  And then...  Undoing Project recounts the story of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's friendship and collaboration.  What is now known as behavioral economics grew out of their work.  Tversky and Kahneman challenged and dismantled old assumptions about people's decisions being based on rational thought. There are numerous non-rational factors that affect the decision process.

The book is as much about the friendship and the collaboration processes that grew out of it as it is about the research that resulted from it.  I'm fascinated by anything about our brains--how we learn, how we decide, how things go wrong (or right) in these mechanisms.  Going back to my notes from the session I attended last month, I found that the speaker had recommended two books:  Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (the authors of the latter were, of course, mentioned in The Undoing Project).  So I have requested the Kahneman book and checked out Nudge.